Lynn gets three to six years

Catholic Monsignor William Lynn "was sentenced on Tuesday to three to six years in prison" for covering up sex abuse, often by transferring predatory priests to unsuspecting parishes, where they continued their predation:

Judge M. Teresa Sarmina told Lynn, 61, the former secretary of the clergy for the Philadelphia Archdiocese, that he protected "monsters in clerical garb who molested children.

Lynn is the highest ranking church official thus far "found criminally liable for child-sex crimes by a priest."

It sets an example by holding an administrator responsible for his involvement. Specifically, the "just following orders" defense was rejected:

Key to Lynn's conviction on June 22, according to the jury foreman, was the monsignor's own testimony that he followed the cardinal's orders to attribute priest's moves to health reasons but never to sex abuse accusations. Testimony also showed Bevilacqua ordered the list of accused priests be destroyed, although a lone copy was found in an archdiocese safe.

Tuesday's sentence sent a message that should be underline for churches of every faith. As the New York Times reported:

“I think this is going to send a very strong signal to every bishop and everybody who worked for a bishop that if they don’t do the right thing, they may go to jail,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “They can’t just say ‘the bishop made me do it.’ That’s not going to be an excuse that holds up in court.”

When is leniency due?

Sex offenders are apparently unsurprised when Southern Baptist clergy seek clemency for them, as Raleigh, N.C., pastor Ricky Mill did last Monday for a man convicted of possessing child pornography.

The pastor's good faith not at issue, but the overall predictability of the behavior is a concern.

In 2003 a researcher [.pdf] was told by a predator:

I considered church people easy to fool ... they have a trust that comes from being Christians...They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people ... I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.

The court was unconvinced, and on firm ground the plea for clemency made by Mills and others. Whatever the personal history of that individual offender, a study of child pornography offenders at the Butner, N.C., federal prison by M.L. Bourke and A.E. Hernandez Journal of Family Violence found:

More than 85 percent admitted to abusing at least one child, they found, compared with 26 percent who were known to have committed any “hands on” offenses at sentencing. The researchers also counted many more total victims: 1,777, a more than 20-fold increase from the 75 identified when the men were sentenced.

That study suggests a risk to the community in releasing a known offender. The offender has a twelve-year history of "looking at images of children being molested and sexually abused," and according to the Charlotte Observer had accumulated "more than 3,400 images and videos of naked, molested boys and girls, toddlers and teens."

If the pattern of seeking leniency had not already been established in cases in involving crimes like and including sexual indecency with children, it might be overlooked. Instead, it should be corrected.

Porn study or study porn?

You read the New Scientist porn study [.pdf] story? They wrongly found meaningful right-wingedness in porn consumption patterns. Molly rightly ran a GetReligion debunking of story and study. Good, even though her analysis was more about how some writers don't get math than about how the press doesn't GetReligion. As her illustration (at left) indicates.

Beliefnet Editor-in-Chief Steve Waldman does not appear to us to have read Molly before he wrote. You see, he speculated about the meaning of porn consumption patterns among church-goers, about which the study data tells us essentially nothing (also the principal significance of the study's findings).

Trample freedom of expression, but nothing to stop pedophiles?

How ironic for Richard Land to mourn the death of the unconstitutional, technologically ineffective Child Online Protection Act without having raised his voice for a pedophilia database to help protect young Baptists from clerical sexual predators.

Land is head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He decried the high court's decision on Jan. 22 as follows:

Unfortunately, our Supreme Court has concluded that an adult's supposed 'right' to see anything he wants to see trumps society's obligation to protect children from exposure to such spiritual toxic waste. Untold human suffering will be the result of this stupefyingly wrong decision.

As if parents were unable to take measures to protect their children.

It would be irrationally optimistic to expect Land and other COPA supporters to note that it:

• Would have imposed serious burdens on constitutionally-protected speech -- anything conceivably "harmful to minors." That standard proved impossible to effectively define.
• Would have failed to prevent children from seeing inappropriate material originating from outside of the US, or available by means other than the World Wide Web.
• Did not represent the least restrictive means of regulating speech. Parental supervision assisted by individually applied filters appear to be that.

A study commissioned by 49 state attorneys general, and released on January 14, noted that parents set their household standards and are the true enforcers of them. As a result:

Parents and caregivers should: educate themselves about the Internet and the ways in which their children use it, as well as about technology in general; explore and evaluate the effectiveness of available technological tools for their particular child and their family context, and adopt those tools as may be appropriate; be engaged and involved in their children's Internet use; be conscious of the common risks youth face to help their children understand and navigate the technologies; be attentive to at-risk minors in their community and in their children's peer group; and recognize when they need to seek help from others.

May we turn now to dealing with the large number of Baptist clerical sexual predators?

Last year the SBC failed to implement an obvious solution that would help, thus earning itself sixth place on Time Magazine's Top 10 Underreported News Stories of 2008:

Facing calls to curb child sex abuse within its churches, in June the Southern Baptist Convention -- the largest U.S. religious body after the Catholic Church -- urged local hiring committees to conduct federal background checks but rejected a proposal to create a central database of staff and clergy who have been either convicted of or indicted on charges of molesting minors.

Certainly the SBC cares enough about children to implement a solution that would actually help remedy a devastatingly destructive problem which burns like a wildfire through its midst?